Babar & Tiny Tim go to this party…

Vin’s bro got married last year and he and his wife are expecting a little baby boy in a month.  They’ve decked out the baby’s bedroom in this nice yellow and got these cute elephant-related bedding and decor for little Timmy’s arrival.  Since their theme was quite obvious, I wanted to create cupcakes for my sister-in-law’s shower that had elephants… and yellow.

My test elephant on a red frosted cupcake; the final cupcakes had green frosting.

I guess the best thing to do was make cake toppers for the cupcakes.  I made batches of blue, grey, and yellow fondant (there goes 2 pounds of confectioner’s sugar) and had extra green frosting from the Sesame Street cupcakes so the toppers would stick.  I already had alphabet cookie cutters for the “T” for “Timmy” (“Timmahhh!”) but I couldn’t find a decent elephant shape that didn’t look weird or would fit on the little cupcakes.  Necessity being the mom of invention and me being of creative and adventurous spirit, I hand cut my own elephant shape.

A few months ago Vin and I were browsing HomeGoods and I was scouring the kitchen/bakeware section for fun new things (I have a tendency to buy cool sprinkles and rarely have occasion to use them so if anyone would like anything with cute sprinkles, please ask!) and I came across this random set of cookie cutters from Italy.  There were letters, numbers, generic shapes like stars and hearts, holiday cut outs, a few animals, etc. etc.  I bought this mostly b/c it was supercheap (plastic instead of metal), there were a lot of cutters (and b/c the size of the letters and numbers would fit perfectly on cupcakes.

I scanned the box to see if they had an elephant for me… there was one, but it just looked odd and was too big anyway.  And then I did a double take.  Included in this box of cookie cutters were a few dinosaurs.  There was a brontosaurus.  Its head and long neck were PERFECT FOR AN ELEPHANT’S TRUNK!  I cut out 3 small fondant circles and made a test cut of the dino head in the fondant then laid it out.  The original idea was to see the elephant’s head straight on using 2 circles for the ears, one as the head, and then the trunk.  It was cute, but way too big for the cupcake.  I rearranged the pieces so that the elephant would be facing the left and 2 circles would be used as the ears.  Not only did it fit better (the trunk was hanging off the side but it was kind of cool like that), but it actually looked more “realistic”.  Quite happy with the outcome, I was… which really was no surprise since I’m a genius and all.  =)

Fondant cake toppers

The next steps were a breeze.  Rolling out the yellow fondant then cutting out circles to be the base for the toppers wasn’t bad @ all, and punching out little “T”s were easy.  I assembled the toppers and stacked the layers on paper plates to stabilize in the fridge for a day.  I actually couldn’t attend the baby shower b/c we were heading upstate for my best friend from high school’s wedding party (<3 you, K +P!), so I had to bring all the naked cupcakes, the green icing, the toppers and a piping bag to Vin’s parents’ house to put everything together.

In the end there were 14 cupcakes with blue “T”s and 14 with elephant faces, and I threw in some chocolate minis with plain green icing.  I didn’t have a chance to get final close up shots of the cupcakes before the shower.  (I guess I’d better teach myself how to use the SLR to take my own photos.)  I heard the party was fun and that the cupcakes were enjoyed (phew!).  Can’t wait for little Timmy!!!

Photo of the baby shower table set up

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.